Art Crazy Nation *

Wednesday 30 January 2002 00:00 BST

It used to be depressingly unpopular; now it's depressingly popular. Art may have been the new rock and roll for some years now, but there is something horribly false about the popularity it currently enjoys. As Matthew Collings argues in his new book, Art Crazy Nation, which inspired this exhibition: "People are crazy about art but they don't really know what they're looking at ... They just believe what they're told."

To help liberate the minds of the public from the grim shackles of the art establishment, Collings, who is best known for presenting the Turner Prize show on TV, has put together what must be one of the only exhibitions of recent times to have an explicitly revolutionary/reactionary agenda. Here he flies the flag for a more old-fashioned, sensitive and aesthetic approach to art. All the works on show, he says, share "a secret visual language", and to underline his point he has selected a number of unfashionable abstract paintings that could only work on an aesthetic level (but don't).

At the same time, he manages to include plenty of familiar and fashionable conceptual artists. Sarah Lucas takes a saccharine-sweet look at death, exhibiting a human skull replete with a shiny set of new gold teeth and a coffin constructed from thin, pink, neon-light tubes. The Chapman brothers, meanwhile, fill up one room with seven ugly, waist-high, glass fibre skulls covered with scrawled writing, which look like props from a beginner's course in voodoo.

More amusingly, Bob and Roberta Smith (actually one person) shows "The worst work of art ever produced: George Bataille is Fat", which consists of the legend "George Bataille is fat " spelt out in brightly-coloured letters on the wall, which is all you probably need to know about Bataille. Equally entertaining is the life-size waxwork of the Standard's Brian Sewell that Collings has impertinently included.

Despite the rhetoric about aesthetics, this show ends up having more of an art-historical feel, being highly representative of late-Nineties art rather than spearheading an aesthetic renaissance. Unfortunately, Collings had little to conjure with in an artistic environment hostile to beauty and sincerity,